Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise: The Museum of Metamorphosis

Upright Boîte, loose folders laid flat before it

Its pull-outs outstretched, the Boîte presides protectively over a plain of neatly arrayed loose folders ("feuilles libres"). In this instance of a popular pose, seen on the Portland Art Museum's page for its Series F example, two loose folders stand upright, one on either side of the Boîte, extending the kind of folding screen that the box's "walls" appear to form and emphasizing its capacity to suggest architectural space. Laying the loose folders out in front of the Boîte, some of them even unfolded, maximizes the space that the whole work takes up on the tabletop and emphasizes the number and variety of the works reproduced in it rather than its compactness or portability as a container. The pose also enables curators to foreground miniature reproductions that tend to be neglected, presented on flat folders and thus less unusual and enticing than the works lining the wall-like panels of the Boîte's upright structure, where pochoir reproductions register more forcefully as miniature artworks rather than reduced-size images of the kind one might find in an art book.

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